Dangerous Minds pal Taylor Jessen, the fabulously meticulous archivist for the Firesign Theatre is in the process of putting together the ULTIMATE collection of rare Firesign Theatre radio shows for a limited edition release via www.firesigntheatre.com. I’ve been raving about these programs (all recorded between 1968-72) on this blog for months and now you can hear them yourself, every Tuesday on WFMU radio at 7:00 pm in the New York area over the airwaves and streaming over the Internet on WFMU.org.

Below Taylor writes of what it was like trying to track down the audio cues used by the FST in an online essay on WFMU’s popular blog, with 30 mp3 files and a contest to win Firesign Theatre photographs signed by all four members:

For ten years or so, the Firesign Theatre has been engaging me in a friendly round of “Stump the Archivist.”

Between 1970-1972, Firesign did about seventy hours of original radio broadcasts. The shows were mostly an excuse for them to riff, but they also played a lot of music breaks, sound effects, incidental music, and total dada noise foofaraw. During those original broadcasts of The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, Dear Friends, and Let’s Eat, they put the needle on the record about 1000 times, and one of the most fun aspects of restoring all those airchecks (soon to be reissued, yes the whole schmear, in remastered digital audio with an accompanying 108-page comic-book-size color fan guide featuring complete show rundowns, an historical essay, new interviews with the 4or5 guys and their engineer & producer, never-published photos, collages, found objects, scripts, and good God make it stop, it’s just too awesome. Please check regularly here and at www.firesigntheatre.com for an official announcement; we’re only making 500 copies and they’ll never be sold in stores) – one of the most fun aspects, I say, of all this obsessive archival work was identifying those 1000 needle-drops.

To play along and try to identify these music cues—-some are easy: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, but others are pretty darn obscure—visit Firesign Theatre is Playing At My House (WFMU’s Beware of the Blog). You only have to be able to identify ONE of the musical mysteries to win!

Below, my recent interview with the Phil Proctor about the vintage Firesign Theatre radio shows being aired on WFMU:
 

 
Firesign Theatre on Dangerous Minds

 
Stories, with lead singer Ian Lloyd performing Brother Louie on The Midnight Special in 1973. This song came out when I was 7-years-old. I wonder if I had any idea what it was about at that age, or if I just thought that it sounded vaguely scary?

We Americans only know this version, but the song was originally a hit for Hot Chocolate, more famous on these shores more for You Sexy Thing. It was written by Hot Chocolate’s Tony Wilson and Errol Brown. The spoken word bit in their version is done by blues great Alexis Korner.

 
Ever found yourself wondering what became of all of Michael Jackson’s exotic pets? Of course you have! From the Telegraph:

Few will need reminding that Jackson’s highest-profile pet was a chimpanzee named Bubbles. After rescuing him from a research centre in the early Eighties he took him on his Bad world tour.

Bubbles wowed fans by mimicking his moonwalk on stage and the two became inseparable. At Neverland, the ape slept in a cot in the singer’s bedroom and used his lavatory.
However, after the birth of Jackson’s son Prince Michael Jnr, Bubbles – who was growing into moody adolescence – was deemed potentially dangerous and moved to a sanctuary for Hollywood animals.

For the past six years he has resided in Florida at the Center For Great Apes. Half of the money needed for his care – which costs £12,000 per year – is still provided by Jackson’s estate.

‘Michael owned Bubbles all these years,’ says Patti Ragan, who runs the centre. ‘He would visit him, but he couldn’t handle him any more.‘Chimps that appear on television are almost always very young. When they grow up they get very big and have huge canine teeth. They become very dangerous so can’t work around actors and entertainers.’

The reporter, Ewan Flectcher, apparently couldn’t resist adding:

The chimp, like his owner, is also very fond of children.

‘There are some youngsters in his group, little kids, and he loves to play games with them,’ she says. ‘He likes to be groomed by the others in his group and sometimes he’ll groom them.’

For more about Jackson’s other pets, including Thriller the tiger, read: Michael Jackson’s menagerie (Telegraph)

Plus video: THE REUNION OF THE CENTURY: La Toya & Bubbles! (dlisted)

 
Since I’m on the subject of bowed gongs and such, Here are a couple of stellar performance clips of Kobe,Japan born now Pennsylvania based percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Contrast his furious free-jazz stylings in the duet with flautist Kaoru Watanabe with the gorgeous drone workout in the solo clip. It’s very enjoyable to see the vocabulary of percussion expanded and stretched into ever lengthening washes of rich sound. Dude’s a complete bad-ass.

 
Thanks Dave Madden !

 
Coming from this dude? Really???
 
(via The Daily What)

 
Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened 44 years ago today during a summer of tumult. Not only were massive protests against the Vietnam War hitting Washington DC, but the last trouble-free marriage sitcom, The Dick van Dyke Show, had just aired its last episode. It was on.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took on the roles of inadequate associate history prof George and his drunk university-president’s-daughter wife Martha two years into their actual marriage, which itself was one of the most scrutinized in pop culture history. The then-thrice-divorced Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar, and Haskell Wexler’s stark cinematography scored him a statuette as well. Controversy over how much of the play’s profanity to include in the film would compel the MPAA’s Jack Valenti to convert the industry’s old Production Code into the rating system we know today.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman ingeniously situates George and Martha’s relentless turning-point fight in a well-lit parking lot, giving Taylor the pacing space to sprawl out the argument across the psyche of tortured married couples across America. The pair’s agreement on “total war” seems almost chilling in its self-indulgence in the context of President Johnson’s escalating the horrific bombing of North Vietnam at the time.
 

 
Examining the (apparently?) inadvertent lavender subtext of Nightmare on Elm Street 2. From the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy.

Who knew?
 
Via Popnography. Thank you Rupert Russell!
 

 
There may be a short film that’s quite as vivid, courageous and intense as poet Forough Farrokhzad’s Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black)—her 1962 portrait of a leper colony in the northwest of her native Iran—but I can’t think of it. Farrokhzad was a Tehran-born female poet born in 1935 to a career military officer and married off to the satiric writer Parviz Shapour at age 16. Farrokhzad divorced Shapour two years later and lost custody of her one-year-old child.

As much as it surfaces the sufferings of a rejected population, the 22-minute Khaneh… (excerpted below) clearly but subtly reflects Farrokhzad’s own attitude about autocratic Iranian society’s disapproval of her as a strong woman poet. The twenty-something scribe weaves her verse in voiceover throughout the footage, and her raw editing style moves agilely between long studies and quick cuts. The film would inspire the Iranian New Wave in cinema that flourished starting in the late’60s.

Farrokhzad would eventually adopt the child of two of the patients in the colony. Unfortunately, she died in a car-crash five years after the film was released, at the age of 32.
 

 
Watch: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black) by Forough Farrokhzad. 1962, 22 minutes B&W 35mm 
 
Get: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House Is Black) [DVD]

 
Sometimes a picture IS worth a thousand words. This is one of them.

Via the fuck yeah tanaka Tumblr blog

 
Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964) is a beautiful meeting of five people, a large gong, a microphone (used as a friction device) and a filter. From that unlikely grouping comes a cosmos of sound, so ripe is the idea of amplfied resonant metal. Need I point out that this is a major root of the later Neubautens and Organums of the world ? The clip below is packed full of interesting info so you can read along whilst having your face melted.